


help me through the night

by acezukos (purplefennels7)



Series: abby does fleet week 2k20 [4]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Sleep, a lil war trauma for spice, bato has to physically pick hakoda up before he agrees to sleep, ft zuko's rainbow fire, they help each other sleep thats it thats the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:08:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25620343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplefennels7/pseuds/acezukos
Summary: During the war, Hakoda forgets to sleep, unless Bato is there to remind him. When peace comes, Hakoda repays the favour.
Relationships: Bato/Hakoda (Avatar)
Series: abby does fleet week 2k20 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1851535
Comments: 19
Kudos: 151
Collections: Bakoda Fleet Week 2020





	help me through the night

**Author's Note:**

> and i thought i was done with long things. whoops! (instead of the write short fics challenge i should do the when will i not write about the war challenge) and i am so late with this one hhh :') part one is set during the war; part two after it. i promise despite the war trauma tag it really is just cute and soft they simply Care For One Another 
> 
> title from "world turning" by fleetwood mac

i.

Bato wakes up early to find the cabin that he shares with Hakoda empty, the other bedroll still rolled up tightly and secured with its piece of string and the stub of a candle, burned down to the base of the holder, on the desk. He makes his way up to the main deck, the sun just starting to peek over the horizon as their little fleet bobs at anchor in the shallow water off a chain of islands, and finds Hakoda leaning against the rail, staring down at a piece of parchment in his hands. This is not entirely abnormal, but Bato distinctly remembers him standing almost in the exact same position when he’d bid him good night hours ago. 

“Chief,” he says, rubbing his eyes and walking across the deck to stand next to him. Hakoda doesn’t seem to hear him at first, and when Bato leans over to look at what he’s holding, it turns out to be a map of the upper shores of the Earth Kingdom. “Hakoda, have you slept at all?”

“Hmm?” Hakoda says finally, shaking his head a little as if woken from a doze. “Oh, good morning, Bato. And don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Again, Hakoda seems to take a while to process Bato’s words, and then an even longer time to blink slowly before he responds.

“Oh. Sleep? Haven’t got time to. You know how many refugee camps there are along this coast? I’ve been thinking, we have space on some of our ships, if we can transport some of them as close to Ba Sing Se as we can make without being spotted by the blockade - we have some time still before we’re even ready to think about staging anything major against the Fire Nation, and something like this would fit right into there.” Bato shakes his head, smiling a little in spite of his worry. It’s just such a  _ Hakoda _ sort of thing to do, stay up all night just trying to help more people even if it means risking their own safety to do it.

“Hakoda, I think helping the refugees is a good idea, but you’re not going to get any planning done if you don’t let yourself sleep. You’re practically falling asleep standing up.” Hakoda shakes his head, trying to stand a little straighter, but the way he’s leaning heavily against the rail gives him away. As he wobbles, the map falls from his hand, and Bato snatches it out of the air before it can flutter overboard. Under the guise of whispering something in his ear, he leans over and presses a kiss to Hakoda’s temple. Hakoda jumps and glances around, clearly trying to figure out if any of their men are around. They aren’t really, officially public with their relationship quite yet, not in the middle of the war. It isn’t that they expect too much backlash, even with Hakoda being chief - the South was never much like the North in that - but they don’t need anything else to contend with now. 

“Bato, what are you doing? Give me my map back,” he hisses, but he’s practically slurring his words with exhaustion. “If we’re going to do this, we need to have been sailing yesterday.”

“Trying to get you to admit you need to sleep,” Bato whispers back, kissing his temple again just to watch him fluster. “Or I’ll just stand here until you fall over, how does that sound? The sunrise does look very nice.” He deliberately holds the map out with his free arm, far enough that Hakoda would have to walk around him to reach it.

“I’m  _ fine,” _ Hakoda insists, trying to grab for it. Bato turns his eyes to the sky, blowing out a breath, and waits.

It doesn’t take long. Hakoda finally pushes away from the rail, moving like he means to step around Bato for the map, and fairly collapses. Bato catches him easily, one arm around his back, and scoops him up like a sack. 

“Hmm - fuck. Bato, put me down,” Hakoda mumbles, but turns his head further into Bato’s shoulder, eyelids flickering shut. Bato looks down at him, his eyelashes fanning across his cheeks as he struggles to keep his eyes open, and feels a rush of fondness clog his throat.

“Not a chance,” he replies, readjusting Hakoda in his arms so he can hold the map without crumpling it. “There’s no one out here except the lookouts, and I’m sure they’ve seen worse.” 

“Hn.” Bato takes this as a sound of affirmation, and after dropping a kiss to Hakoda’s forehead, just because he can’t help himself, carries him belowdecks and back to their cabin. There, he encounters a new problem: Hakoda’s bedroll is still tied up, and he can’t unroll it without putting Hakoda down and he’s pretty sure he’d just fall over if he did that. Eventually, he decides just to set him down on his own bedroll, still unmade from when he’d gotten up. He’s never been the type of person to fall asleep again once he’s awake, and even though some mornings he’ll just lie there and watch the sun peek in through the cabin window and paint Hakoda’s face gold, he has some things he thinks he can take care of.

“Bato, I don’t need to sleep, the men need orders-” Hakoda says as Bato puts him down, but his eyes are already closing.

“I think we can take care of ourselves for a couple hours,” Bato replies, unable to resist smoothing a finger over the stress lines in Hakoda’s forehead, tracing the line of his crooked nose from when Bato had accidentally broken it in a sparring accident, his cheekbones even more prominent over his tired, sunken cheeks. “You work too hard, love” he says without thinking.

“There’s a war on.” Bato shakes his head, running a hand over his half-up wolftail and tucking in a few stray strands. He loves Hakoda for his selflessness, for his willingness always to put people first, even if he’s never met them, but sometimes he wishes he could be just a little less so. Just enough so that he takes care of himself in the midst of it all.

“Sleep, Koda. I’ll keep the watch.” He presses their foreheads together gently, then gets to his feet. Hakoda’s breaths are already going deep and slow and even, eyes sliding all the way shut. The tension etched permanently into the lines of his body when he’s awake melts away as sleep pulls him under, and Bato watches him for long minutes before leaning down to take off his boots so he can muffle his footsteps on the wood floor as he tiptoes over to the desk, picking up the chair and setting it down so it doesn’t scrape across the floor when he sits down. He picks up Hakoda’s map and a otter-penguin feather quill, and starts to write.

Later, once Bato has gone around to the rest of the fleet and made a couple preparations, sitting out on the deck in the sunlight with his papers so he can watch over the crew while he’s working, he picks up the stack of parchment with a schedule allowing them to stop by as many refugee camps as their ships can hold in the weeks before any sort of attack on the Fire Nation is possible, and brings it back to their cabin with a full waterskin. He sets the parchment down on the desk where Hakoda will see it the first time he sits down, then sits cross-legged next to the bedroll. He stays there, content to simply take in the familiar lines of Hakoda’s face, peaceful and free of the weight that drags at him day in and day out, until he starts to stir, blinking sleepy blue eyes up at him.

“Hey,” Hakoda says quietly, voice rough with sleep. Bato smiles, handing over the waterskin for him to take a long drink.

“Hey, sleepy. Feeling better?” Hakoda nods. 

“Thanks,” he says, sipping more water and handing the skin back. “I know I can be…”

“A stubborn ass sometimes?” Bato teases, taking his own drink and then setting the water to the side. Hakoda glares at him, but it’s half-hearted and he’s very badly hiding a fond smile. “It’s because you care. You always put other people before yourself and I love you for it, but as someone who loves you I wish you’d take better care of yourself.” Hakoda grins wryly, sitting up in Bato’s bedroll and running his hands through his hair. The dark circles under his eyes no longer look like they might swallow him up, and his eyes are bright as he looks over at him, and with the blankets pooling around him he looks achingly beautiful in the fading light and Bato can no less stop the ship in its tracks than he can stop himself from swaying in to kiss him. Hakoda nips gently at his bottom lip, and Bato scoots closer so he can curve one hand around the back of Hakoda’s head and pull him in deeper, and the relief he feels is like a clean, sharp breath of ocean air. 

They’ll be alright. He knows it.

As the moon rises over the edge of the horizon, Bato will pull Hakoda to his feet and out to the main deck, where they’ve managed to squeeze most of the men around a makeshift table made of driftwood collected from the island shore they’re anchored at. Illuminated by a few hanging lanterns and the moon, they talk and laugh and eat the day’s catch of fish long into the night. Bato tells a couple embarrassing stories about Hakoda as a kid; all the older warriors have invariably heard them at least once over the years, but the younger ones are clearly fascinated by their fearless leader getting himself knocked off his boat by a particularly insistent polar dog. Hakoda retaliates with the story of Bato breaking his nose, and as they clear the plates Hakoda will lean over under the cover of darkness and kiss his cheek, soft and sweet, and whisper  _ thank you, so much, my love, _ and Bato will lean into it and feel, even out here hundreds of miles away, like he’s home.

* * *

ii.

It turns out that when he isn’t worrying about leading his tribe through a hundred-year war, Hakoda reverts back to his teenage tendency to fall asleep on command. On any given night, he’s out like a light almost as soon as his head hits the pillow in their frankly over-decorated room in the Fire Nation palace - and that’s weird in of itself, to be living for a time in the royal palace without being there to be thrown in jail, or worse. Bato overhears him pointing this out to the kids, one day when they’re sitting on one of the verandas watching Aang and Toph practice earthbending using the slightly unconventional, but admittedly very cathartic approach of tearing down statues of the previous Fire Lord and replacing them with, among others, ones of Toph herself. 

“There’s a new Fire Lord, dad, haven’t you heard?” is Sokka’s deadpan response to this. 

“It is sort of weird,” Katara muses, tapping Sokka over the head with a water whip. Sokka yelps and scrabbles at his now-damp hair. “But Zuko is making real changes in the Fire Nation, and we’ll be around to help as much as we can.”

“It’s weird that the kids are friends with the Fire Lord,” Hakoda hisses into his ear, as said Fire Lord appears at the entrance to the gardens with Suki in his wake, and the siblings immediately abandon their snarking at each other to join them. “Isn’t that weird?” Bato just laughs.

“Like you haven’t adopted that kid in your head already.” And perhaps not even in your head for that much longer, he thinks to himself, watching as Sokka throws an arm around Fire Lord Zuko’s shoulders, heedless of the stiff pauldrons of his regalia, and drags him off to practice “swordbending” on the opposite side of the courtyard. 

_ There’s a new Fire Lord, _ Bato thinks stubbornly, wide awake later that night as Hakoda snuffles into the pillow next to him.  _ The war is over. They’re safe. _

He’s been having this fight with himself nearly every night since the end of the war, not to mention before it. For all his encouraging Hakoda to sleep, he’d barely been any better. There was just always so  _ much _ to do, lookout to keep, supplies to acquire, battle plans to make, and as second in command he’d always felt responsible for taking as much of the load onto his own shoulders as he could. The threat of attack at any moment would turn anyone into an insomniac, and Bato had never had Hakoda’s innate ability to sleep on cue. 

Perhaps foolishly, he’d hoped that the end of the war, if they did live to see it, might help, and he’d clung to that in those days and weeks after the failed invasion, after Hakoda had been taken away and he’d been de facto leader of the remaining men in prison. He hadn’t slept well then, either, always on the lookout for guards and keeping an eye on the injured. By the time they’d been freed, according to Hakoda, he’d looked like a spirit with how pale he was, and how dark the shadows under his eyes had been. He’d nearly collapsed into Hakoda’s arms after that, and after confirming that somehow, miraculously, none of the kids had been killed, and the rest of the injured warriors were being cared for, into bed for nearly a full day.

He thinks that might be the first and the last time he’d slept that well, that night after the end of the war. Every night after that, leading up to and now after Zuko’s coronation, he’d laid awake for hours after Hakoda had already fallen asleep, one arm around his waist and his face buried either in the pillow or in Bato’s side. Somewhat irrationally, he misses the time right before they’d sailed, when he and Hakoda had just been starting to try this thing simmering between them. In those days, just curling up together on the same bedroll had been enough to send both of them off to sleep in minutes. Now, he still can’t sleep well without Hakoda’s familiar weight next to him, but the difference is that he also can’t sleep even with it.

One night, about a month and a half into their slightly extended stay in the Fire Nation as the last of the preliminary peace accords were hammered into place, Bato hears the muffled rush-whoosh of firebending from outside the half-open balcony doors. He freezes on pure instinct, feeling his stomach drop with panic. He’s taken to sitting by while Aang and Fire Lord Zuko - just Zuko, please - practice during the day, trying to accustom himself to the sound and the sight of flames that he knows aren’t going to hurt him. He’s been getting better at it, too; when he’d first broached the topic Hakoda had insisted on coming with him, and he’s pretty sure he came close to breaking his fingers those first few times with how tight he’d been holding onto his hands. Now he can sit almost serenely, their only contact their pinky fingers linked together. 

Now, trying his best not to disturb Hakoda, he wriggles out from under his arm and pulls himself upright, wincing as the movement stretches at one of his scars. His heart is still pounding erratically as he makes his way across the room and pushes one of the doors open, letting the warm night air wash over him. As he picks his careful way to the edge of the balcony, he starts to recognize the noise not as the gusty sound of offensive bending, but something quieter, peaceful almost, like the whisper of wind around the bases of the igloos back home. He peers over the balcony railing to see a slim figure in Fire Nation red and gold, doing some sort of - dance? around the edge of the pond in the courtyard below. The air is lit every few steps with a burst of flame, but the typical orange and yellow is shot through with brilliant streaks of purple and green and blue, and without his express permission Bato’s mouth falls open. The figure leaps into a spin kick and sends an arc of the rainbow fire crackling across the stone, bursting against the colonnades like waves against a shore. As they right themselves, the ball of fire still alight in one hand illuminates a scarred face and dark, messy hair, and Bato thinks that he’s never seen an expression of such pure joy on Fire Lord Zuko for the short time he’s known him.

The kid - spirits, he really is just a kid, just seventeen and ruling a country - pulls his hands together, looking reverently down at the shrinking flame, and then with a quick flicker of his fingers sends it exploding out into a half-dome the height of the palace roof, and as Bato cranes his neck upwards he makes out that it’s composed of thousands of individual points of light, like little candle flames lighting up the night. When he peeks over the railing again, Zuko is staring up too, hands still outstretched to hold the fire in place, childish wonder spread across his face. 

Bato is still staring when he hears the shuffle of feet, and then the balcony doors creak.

“Bato?” Hakoda asks sleepily, padding barefoot out onto the balcony. “What are you doing up - woah.” Bato chuckles and lifts his arm so Hakoda can tuck himself into the space by his side, wrapping sleep-warm arms around his waist and looking up at the multicoloured display, eyes wide and awed.

“Couldn’t sleep. Heard firebending and,” he gestures out at where Zuko is starting to trace patterns in the dome of flames, almost like he’s weaving a tapestry. Hakoda turns worried eyes up at him, clearly concerned at the mention of the bending. “I’m okay,” he says, and surprises himself with how much he believes it. “This is different. I can feel it, somehow.”

Hakoda doesn’t look entirely convinced, peering at the dark circles that Bato knows are under his eyes after over a month of lost sleep. 

“Are you?” he asks. “I mean, besides from the bending. Not that I’m not glad you’re doing better with that.” Even sleepy-eyed and soft against Bato’s side, his words carry a hint of authority that tell him that he won’t stop pressing until he gets a straight answer. Bato decides to give it to him.

“I haven’t been sleeping well. I didn’t want to bother you with it because you seemed to be doing fine and Tui knows you need the rest, but it’s been, uh, since the war ended, really.” Hakoda’s eyes widen, and then narrow in frustration.

“Bato,” he says, in a voice very reminiscent of him scolding the kids, and Bato winces a little. “You have to take better care of yourself. And you have to tell me about these things.”

“You have enough on your plate with the negotiations, and may I remind you how many times I literally carried you to bed on the ship?” 

“That was different. We have time, now, and frankly, I think it’s long past due that I looked after you for a change. We were all so busy during the war.” His gaze goes melancholy, like he’s miles away, and Bato slides a hand up to cup his cheek.

“None of that, now.” Hakoda blinks a few times, turning into Bato’s hand and kissing his palm.

“I’m alright, I promise. Let me help you, love. Please.”

“Okay,” Bato whispers. “Okay.” 

In the courtyard, Zuko brings his arms down, shaping the flame with his fingers and letting the last of the fire flicker out of existence. Together, they tiptoe off the balcony and slip back into bed, and as he curls into Hakoda’s side, Bato feels an unfamiliar sort of peace settle over him. He sleeps soundly through the rest of the night, and when he wakes up, it’s to Hakoda with a tray of breakfast and a fond smile.

“Sleep well?” he asks, setting the tray down on the table so he can slide back under the covers, leaning over to peck Bato on the cheek. 

“I did,” Bato replies, and he means it.

**Author's Note:**

> written for day 4 of [bakoda fleet week](https://bakodafleetweek.tumblr.com) for the _love languages_ prompt. 
> 
> on [tumblr](https://acezukos.tumblr.com)


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